social media

Emily Stewart dropped me a line, alerting me to a tidy little video about social media from a small/micro business perspective. A useful one to play to friends and clients/prospects still unsure about this social media fad.

My new report from Ark Group: Measuring the Impact and ROI of Social Media – By Lee Hopkins and Anne Bartlett-Bragg is out. Pre-publication price $275 plus gst ($15 postage and handling) – save over a $100. Here’s the Order Form [pdf] and here’s a summary [pdf]. Packed with practical tips and real-world insights, this […]

3. Develop Quality Content – Social media like Facebook and Twitter are just digital permission marketing. People choose to follow or like your page, but they won’t make a return visit if the only thing you churn out is marketing material. On social media and in a monthly e-newsletter, write (or hire a writer) to generate quality content that’s relevant and helps your clients and customers become more informed about your industry. Even if you’re not directly promoting a product you sell, you’re building trust for when it’s time for them to make a purchase.

Social media is a risk. You risk expending energy on something that won’t reap you the rewards you seek. But that is true of any business activity. If you contact me or one of the aforementioned professionals, you stand a far greater chance of your activities actually reaping dividends.

The event was held to launch Optus’ ‘Future of Business’ report, the research and analysis for which was conducted by Deloitte Access Economics. The report is no small offering: the public face of it comprises two documents, ‘Research and Findings’ and ‘Analysis and Insights’. This is a heavy-duty piece of research.

Mohsin Ghafoor and Trinity Martin have written an excellent article on the Outlook site, the online journal of high-performance business. The journal has an iPad app, making reading easier. In the article, ‘Six ways social media technologies accelerate large-scale change’, they make some compelling arguments.

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Recommended reading

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Tactical Transparency by Shel Holtz and John Havens.A belter of a book and a 'must read' addition to any communicator's bedside reading table if they are serious about introducing social media into their communication plans. It includes a fabulous chapter on transparency and business (hint: you want to photocopy it and give it to your CEO!)

Qualitative Communication Research Methods by Thomas Lindlof and Bryan Taylor.Not just a book for academics, it's chock-full of great ideas on how to effectively and efficiently research your employees, customers, the marketplace and other stakeholders

The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein.
A fabulous book that gives a clear, clean overview of what Twitter is and WHY you should be engaging with it. THEN it goes into depth with so many tips and ideas that they should have sold the book for twice the price!

Practical SEO Copywriting: a ‘must get’ book. My mate Glenn Murray has written a bottler of a new book on search engines and copywriting.

In a cunning twist of bizarre nomenclature, he’s titled it Practical SEO Copywriting. The cheeky little fox! It’s a DIY guide to writing online copy for both human readers AND for that 400kg gorilla we lovingly call ‘Google’.

The danger, Glenn quite rightly …err …writes is that focusing too much attention on all of the supposed SEO ‘tricks of the trade’ will make your copy all but unreadable by the human brain. You know, all that stuff bandied about by the so-called SEO (search engine optimisation) experts: keyword frequency, exact string versus individual words scattered across the page, page length, alt tags, header tags, and so on.

Not that this stuff isn’t important – it all is, and more besides – but Glenn argues persuasively that by far more important is the ability to write copy that people will actually want to read – and link to!

Vodburner is my tool of choice for recording skype video calls, either for later podcasting or simply for my own record. Now that video is becoming more and more important, I can't imagine online life without it.More about Vodburner...